In this post I will walk you through a change management size and readiness analysis. You will also see examples of a completed change management analysis from a software upgrade project. You can benefit from some of the challenges and lessons learned from my experience.
How to determine if your company is ready for change
A Change Size Analysis gives you an idea of how large the change is that you will be dealing with and how difficult it’s going to be to gain adoption.
Doing this analysis up front in the project is crucial to identifying what is necessary to prepare your company and financial investment.
For instance, a small project , with minimal change does not need the level of change management coordination, as say a large change project for an organization/enterprise transformation.
5 key items to consider for Change Readiness
- Impacted individuals (number, job roles and different work areas)
- Locations (Geography and number)
- Technology impacts
- Work processes impacted
- Customer impact
Software Upgrade Change Size and Readiness Analysis
The questions in the first column are based on the current state of the areas. Then they are scored by size of the impact (minimal, moderate, or significant impact)
Each category section, are added up and the total for all sections are carried over to the risk assessment chart at the end of the analysis.
The largest impact for this specific change project was that the vendor relationship would be terminated.
The intent of the project was to rebuild a system currently being licensed from a vendor, with more customizations. It was important throughout the project, that the vendor did not find out about this effort. In this example, we had to continue with training and development requests for 1.0, but continue working with the vendor as usual.
Needless to say, it was a lot of extra work and caused massive confusion and frustration for those involved.
Business Readiness Analysis
Once you know the level of the change complexity through the Change Size Analysis, you can do the Business Readiness Analysis to determine whether your organization is capable of delivering the change.
- Is there a compelling and visible business case?
- Leadership commitment or have previous changes left a bad taste?
- Stakeholder perception of change competence – is it negative or positive and how will employees react based on performance history
- Resource capacity -are people overwhelmed with work already?
- Competing projects – maybe ones where the same resources are being used ?
All of this plays a role in documenting your risk assessment and determining your level of change management needs.
Software upgrade Business Readiness Questions
The first column are questions to ask impacted leaders. The readiness score is a numerical representation, as well as a label that makes it easier to identify where you are as an organization at a glance.
As you can see lots of red down this column for readiness. This effort was difficult. With this project they were not ready, for any of the categories. It took significant Change Management coordination to right size this situation.
The comments column is extremely important because this is where you can jot down some details that will help you in the long run when making recommendations or with the implementation.
The total rating for readiness was pretty high at 33. This is what we place on the risk assessment
Must have’s for a successful change project
I wanted to sound the freaking alarms when I completed this analysis. Holy Moly!
You must have Trust across working teams: In this example, there was absolutely NO trust. The Sponsor didn’t trust the development team to deliver. There were multiple sponsors who didn’t trust each other and were competing with each other
over this effort.
You must have Commitment and Buy-in: Also with this example there was NO commitment from stakeholders to accept the development when it was complete and really no commitment from the development team on what they were actually delivering other than a replica of the vendor system.
You must have an Executive Support: For this software upgrade, there was NO executive support because usually that is your sponsor and it was unclear who the actual sponsor was since there were so many feet in the fire!
And overall it came down to just a significant amount of company politics that caused a lot of confusion across the employee groups, frustration with the teams, extra money spent on time and efforts that were shot down due to conflicting opinions.
Risk Assessment for a Change project
According to the Risk Assessment chart, the software project was rated as a medium risk. The risk assessment took into consideration both analyses to paint the bigger picture for the organization to make a decision against. It’s to help them determine how much change management coordination will be needed in order for the project to be successful.
Here’s why: Since we had 19 on the change size analysis, the project is rated as having a small/minimal chang. The readiness score was 33 which falls in the area of change resistance at the top part of the chart.
So as you can see…Just because it’s a small initiative, doesn’t mean it will be an easy one!
Making a recommendation based on your analysis
Taking into consideration that the risk was rated a medium, I went to work on my action plan, pulling directly from my observations during the interviews and side by sides, and also from the assessments. **Remember when I said the comments are very helpful
As I went through my interviews and conversations with key stakeholders, I noted the issues that I needed to keep track of. This helped me in determining the mitigation plan and also to provide recommendations back to the business in order for them to prepare for the change.
One of the key observations I identified through my analysis was that the organization was spending a lot of time and money to continue training employees on 1.0 when 2.0 was getting ready to be rolled out.
There needed to be a decision made to re-evaluate the need and priority to educate on the legacy system 1.0. I broke down each area, how many employees were still needing to be trained, and how much money it would be to continue the training for these areas.
Leaders tend to understand the detail better when you break it down into how it is impacting their bottom line. So having a visual of time and $ makes it easier for the business to make decisions.
Stakeholder Communication of Change
Lastly another key take away from my analysis was the need for stakeholder communication. My change efforts did not start at the front part of the project as it should have.
As you will experience for yourself, a lot of times change leaders are brought in when projects are going off track and they need support to get people on board.
So I recommended communicating a clear message be sent to all those that would be impacted by this change.
- To build awareness around the 2.0 efforts
- Share the “Why” this was happening
- How it would impact the different teams
This list went to the sponsor for them to take action on my recommendations.
Check out my YouTube video on this topic by clicking here.
